I disagree. I have used Django extensively. The ORM handles raw SQL queries, but which is great when you need something beyond the capabilities of ORM, but you loose a lot as well when you go that route.

Pagination and sorting are pretty easy additions when you retrieve data using the ORM in the standard way, and now you need to add extra code to handle those specifically. I don't think you can use the Django admin with raw SQL (I never tried, but it doens't make too much sense, as it basically generates a set of views per table). Model methods don't make sense using SQL queries.

You should be able to write SQL if you want to be able to use the ORM effectively and I am certainly glad I knew it well before started using Django's ORM.

What makes you think Django ORM is good ORM? What is bad about adding "extra code" if that code is doing a useful and correct thing? And I wonder why people find Django Admin useful for anything than simple CRUD apps. Writing code so it can go along with django admin is a strange way of thinking, there should be other priorities first.